Art historian, critic and magazine founder; Piero della
Francesca scholar. Longhi's parents were originally from Emilia. Longhi wrote his dissertation on Caravaggio under Pietro Toesca in Turin, 1911. He supported himself by teaching art history
in the licei (high schools) of Rome while attending the School
of Advanced Studies (in Rome) under Adolfo Venturi. Venturi, impressed with Longhi's intellect,
assigned him the book reviews section of Venturi's magazine, L'Arte, in
1914. He also contributed to L'Arte and La Voce between 1913-1920. Longhi's two
life-long art subjects were Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca.
Piero was still a relatively obscure artist when Longhi published a 1914 article
on him, "Piero dei Franceschi e lo sviluppo della pittura veneziana," (Piero
Francesca and the Development of Venetian Painting).
The publisher Mario Broglio (1891-1948), who founded the journal Valori Plastici in
1918, asked Longhi to write a full-length monograph on the artist. Although a
Renaissance historian, Longhi also took a keen interest in modern art,
championing the Futurists and especially Umberto Baccioni but disparaging the
Pittura Metafisica movement. Around the 1920, he became part of the
circle of the collector and art dealer Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi
(1878-1955), who funded Longhi's travels and helped launch his career as a
connoisseur. In 1924 he married the writer Lucia Lopresti (1895 -1985), who
wrote under the pen name "Anna Banti." In 1927 Broglio brought out Longhi's
masterwork, Piero della Francesca, establishing Piero as one of the
great Quattrocento artists. This was in contrast to the opinion of
Bernard Berenson whose 1897 Central Italian Painters of the
Renaissance considered Piero "unemotional" and "impassive." Longhi began
writing for other magazines during this time, including Pinacotheca
(1927-1929) and, as co-editor with Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, in Critica
d'arte. Another of Longhi's fascinations was Caravaggio and the
Caravaggisti. His "Quesiti caravaggeschi," a series of
articles, were published between 1928-1934. Longhi's advocacy of connoisseurship put him at odds with
Lionello Venturi, Adolfo's son and also an art historian, and the two participated in a celebrated debate, most
clearly elaborated in his 1934 book on the painting of Ferrara, Officina ferrarese. The
same year, 1934, Longhi was appointed to the chair of art history at the
University of Bologna. He acquired the Florentine villa, "Il Tasso," in
1939 which became his home. During the height of World War
II, Longhi issued a second edition of his Piero book, 1942, and founded the journal Proporzioni
in 1943, the latter offering
revisionist interpretations to Tuscan art and particularly Giotto's
painting. A second series of articles on Caravaggio appeared as the Ultimi studi caravaggeschi
also in 1943. After the war, Longhi was appointed to the chair of art
history at the university in Florence in 1949. His wide interest in all the arts led to his launching
another journal, Paragone, in 1950, which alternated issues between art and
literature. Longhi wrote the introduction to the catalog of the important
Caravaggio exhibition of Milan in 1951. A third edition of the Piero book
appeared in 1962 and a full-length monograph on Caravaggio (criticized for its
lack of footnotes) was published in 1968. Longhi died at his villa in
1970. The Fondazione Roberto Longhi was founded the following year to
encourage art-historical scholarship. Longhi's
students included the art historian Giovanni Previtali and Luciano Bellosi. Outside the field of art history, the poet Attilio Bertolucci
(1911-2000) and the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) also studied under him.

Longhi remained an influential teacher. His students included
detractors as well as admirers. Though he admired Longhi's writing style, Federico Zeri, the controversial historian
of art, in later years accused Longhi of authenticating fakes to pay gambling
debts. Other students remained more generous. Longhi was philosophically influenced by
the esthetics of Benedetto Croce. He added as early as 1912 a more humane, if slightly romantic
counter to the positivism of Giovanni Morelli, insisting his
connoisseurship was merely "intuition." Longhi's methodology was highly formalist
and connoisseurship-based,
striving to find verbal equivalents for his perceptions of works of art and
notions of "pure painting" (Agosti).
He was more of an advocate of connoisseurship than of a history of art. Charles Hope characterized Longhi
as "a brilliantly eloquent critic and connoisseur, mainly preoccupied with the
intense scrutiny of individual works of art," adding that Longhi lacked the inclination to investigate social and historical circumstances in which art was produced. Longhi was not insensitive to
the criteria, however; the patronage art historian Francis Haskell remarked that
what he admired most about Longhi was "his ability to make historical
connections."